Contents

Biography

Helen Suzman, a native and life-long citizen of South Africa,
was born as Helen Gavronsky in 1917 to immigrants.
[1][2]
She studied as an economist and statistician at Witwatersrand University. At age 19, she
married Dr. Moses Suzman (d. 1994), who was considerably older than
she. She had two daughters with him before returning to university
as a lecturer in 1944. She gave up teaching for politics, being
elected to the House of Assembly in
1953 as a member of the United Party.

She switched to the liberalProgressive Party in
1959, and represented the Houghton constituency as that
party's sole Member of Parliament, and the sole
parliamentarian unequivocally opposed to apartheid, from 1961 to
1974.[3] She was
often harassed by the police and her phone was tapped by them. She
had a special technique for dealing with eavesdropping, which was to blow a
whistle into the mouthpiece of the phone.[4]

Suzman was noted for her strong public criticism of the
governing National Party's policies
of apartheid at a time when this was atypical
of white South Africans, and found herself even more of an outsider
because she was an English-speaking Jewish woman in a parliament
dominated by CalvinistAfrikaner men. She was once accused by a
minister of asking questions in parliament that embarrassed South
Africa, to which she replied: "It is not my questions that
embarrass South Africa; it is your answers".[5]